Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

Well! The exams--my third round of them--begin in a little more than two weeks now. And I'm still woefully unprepared: biofluids is arguably the most worrying one, unintelligible as it is despite the genius of the lecturer--in fact it's quite possible, I'd say, that his sheer genius is the reason I can't understand it. After all when a genius talks, mere mortals must necessarily be confounded until such time as they meditate on the talk and, with glorious snapping of the fingers, understand what was said. Unfortunately time is not a resource I have in large quantity, and biofluids is only one of the many things that worry me. And then? Mechanics of materials, which the Pig apparently has already studied and has most kindly attempted to help me with--the most recent example being a voice call over MSN re: the Mohr's Circle; but with the number of diagrams associated with it and the numerous variables and unknowns, not to mention the fact that he has absolutely lousy ...

This morning was not a good one for me; well it wasn't an entirely bad one, but it was still very irritating as well as time-and-money-wasting... You see, my church has this shuttle bus that leaves a certain bus interchange at 8.40am, which behooves me to take an 8.15 bus from the nearest bus stop to the interchange (it's a fifteen-minute ride) and then wait the ten minutes until the shuttle turns up. Generally I make it on time; in the past year I've only missed the bus two or three times and even then it was my fault for waking late. Today, on the other hand, it wasn't my fault. I woke at 7, was at the bus stop by 8.10... and remained there until 8.30 when a tiny little thing trundled around. By my conjecture the bus company decided that this route brings in too little revenue, and they seem to have reduced the frequency of the buses without having the courtesy to say so--and heck, the frequency as it was, was low enough already! There are two bus routes in the Unive...

I have been pounding my desk quite frequently today. I woke at 9am, or thereabouts--unlike Crazy Scary, I don't tend to wake very early on weekends. Especially not on weekends (although I make an exception for Sunday since I have church). Actually the pounding is days overdue: my computer, again, is having troubles. I've been assured by various sources that these troubles are likely to be recurrent, especially since I'm using a Dell; also these same sources advocate any one of three or four remedies that will be both time-consuming and expensive and I really cannot afford to carry those out at this time in the semester. The troubles, specifically, are: slow start-up time (this has been going on for a little over a month now)--the computer takes about 15 minutes between the time I press ON to the time I can actually begin using it, and I take only 2 seconds to enter my password; and more recently, spontaneous shutdowns/restarts regardless of conditions, as well as inability ...

Whatever happened to the days when the further a place was, the longer it took to get there--and conversely the nearer it was the quicker you could get there? They've gone away apparently, and I'd very much like whoever's in charge of these things to set things right. The reason being mostly that I just got back to my room, and I left at 2 from the grandfolks' house; which means it's been a five-or-so-hour journey, which is more or less equivalent to the time it takes to get between So Hour and KL--or, for that matter, Spore and KL. And the three journeys were conducted by bus, so you can't pull the different-methods-different-speeds card. Ha! My fourth aunt, who made the journey with me (she works here), was somewhat stunned too at the spectacle of a jam reaching back halfway across the Causeway, and even though she is something of a genius when it comes to finding the quickest route between places (though she does say so herself), she was utterly unable to sho...

I'm typing this from the grandfolks' place in So Hour; I arrived a couple days ago--but I'm getting ahead of myself already. First, I must deeply apologise for the immense delay between posts; not that nothing of note has occurred, and not that I've had no time or inclination--I've simply been such a horrible procrastinator, and it does keep slipping my mind and only popping back in when I'm in no position to do it--on a bus, for instance, or moments just before falling asleep. Well, I'm typing up a post now and so you can be grateful for it... though of course, my future self will be grateful too when I come back to see what's been happening. So what's been going on? Not much, I may say--or maybe, a lot, although I don't necessarily remember it all or remember it well. My memory's like a sieve these days... or rather, it's like a somewhat clunky old computer that breaks down every now and then and loses a bit of data when it's back. ...

There are mosquitoes everywhere these days. Flitting behind my computer, around me, on and under my bed, and rather surprisingly they circulate around my nearly-brand-new copy of Fluid Mechanics for Chemical Engineers. I suppose if your life depended on sucking the lifeblood out of people through straw-shaped mouthparts, you'd like to know how to make the process more effective or efficient too; but the mosquitoes aren't taking any notes, which either means they have a better memory than I do or they already intuitively understand the principles--which entirely justifies my ability to snatch them out of the air as they hover over the Bernoulli's Equation. I snatched two yesterday and one today; but in all fairness I only notice them when they're flitting between my eyes and the monitor really; except, of course, when I'm looking around the room to see if they happen to be anywhere noticeable. I typed that entire last sentence (and this one too) with both my eyes clo...

I'm ill. Quite badly so, too... Last Saturday I began coughing and had a sore throat by the night time, which caused me to lack sleep rather and then I developed a headache and a fever. Herr Robson was also sick, with similar symptoms; and I know of a large number of other people who were also sick. We blame the weather, which has been rather bipolar: hot in the mornings, cloudy in the afternoons, and pouring in the evenings and nights. I suppose I should be very happy about the pouring, but I really can't enjoy anything when I'm having coughing fits every now and then. Though I'm thankful that the sore throat went away on Monday and the headache and fever with it, the cough remains and has progressed steadily. I now cough about once every five or six minutes; every now and then, it's a coughing fit that wracks my entire frame (when I'm lying down, this can actually wake me up as well as shake the bed) and sounds rather like a sort of honk, and sometimes creates...